Efforts to revitalize run-down urban neighborhoods often end up doing more harm than good, says a recent book.
The journalist Jacob Riis brought important attention to the urban poor, but the reactions he inspired were not always helpful, says a recent book
The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It, by Howard Husock (Encounter Books, 216 pp., $26.99)
I n 1890, a Danish-born New York newspaper reporter captured the nation’s attention. In gripping prose, Jacob Riis offered a cascade of horrible descriptions, supported by his own striking photographs, illustrating conditions in the dense and squalid tenements of Lower Manhattan. His exposé, How the Other Half Lives, was an early case of what would come to be called photojournalism. It was also an instant landmark. How the Other Half Lives introduced a wide audience to the perils of poverty at the margins of the Gilded Age, leading to investigations and reform proposals nationwide, and earning Riis a place in the colorful history of urban planning. But a new retrospective on American urban policy by author and scholar Howard Husock asserts that those whom Riis influenced, in many ways, missed the mark.
In The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It, Husock maintains that the 20th-century reformists who followed Riis fundamentally misunderstood America’s dynamic urbanism, seeing it as a hopeless prison when it actually was a vital link in a massive (and remarkably successful) conduit of socioeconomic growth. Moreover, he makes a compelling case that Riis’s writings helped inspire a long era of counterproductive, foolish, and cruel public initiatives, from exclusionary zoning to ugly sprawl and massive housing projects, that dismantled the practical, dynamic processes of low-cost urbanism, prolonging and worsening some of the deepest inequalities in American life.
Husock takes readers on a tour of more than a century of stories about the fate of American cities. He covers the idealists with sterling credentials who promoted disastrous national policies and highlights the stubborn local characters who withstood the storm of bad ideas and grand plans to deliver the kinds of incremental, responsive changes that have customarily made urbanism a vital force of civilization. In this approach, Husock echoes the framing of the great urban anti-reformist Jane Jacobs, whose mid-20th-century classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (note the word sequence) described the persistence of a humane, urban spark amid the shadows of dystopian, authoritarian planning.
Husock begins by unearthing an 1894 federal report that shows how the abysmal conditions Riis had identified in Lower Manhattan’s crowded tenements, with little in the way of fresh air or sunlight, were outliers among the many poor sides of American towns and cities. Elsewhere, even in other large, fast-growing industrial cities, the poor neighborhoods of late Victorian times were mainly characterized by smaller homes, often row houses with one to three units, rather than large tenements. Moreover, while these neighborhoods all contained a portion of crowded units, high rates of owner-occupancy in working-class quarters, nationwide, countered the notion that low-rent apartments merely lined the pockets of wealthy absentee landlords. In fact, multifamily houses in poor neighborhoods frequently represented a first rung on the property ladder for working-class Americans.
Essentially, Husock finds that Riis, in his landmark exposé, had built on his experience as a local police reporter, chasing a thrilling story, but that his depictions of the worst conditions in 1890s Manhattan did not exemplify America’s urban housing dynamics. Certainly conditions in America’s industrial cities were sometimes awful. But Husock shows how some of the leading lights in the subsequent reform movement were uniquely unqualified to see important parts of the larger picture or to propose changes to how American cities were built, due to a combination of class blinders and a lack of expertise. Yet, as is often the case, uninformed elite opinion had an outsized impact on American perceptions of the right thing to do — to tragic effect.
Husock’s key argument, contrary to the high-handed reformist narrative, is that poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods, but bad policies can sap this potential. He shows how the value of a place is best understood through qualities that meet practical ends, rather than aesthetics or comforts. Sometimes good, poor neighborhoods are not even especially poor, but merely have room for poor people (e.g., in small, privately owned apartments). Detroit’s lost Black Bottom neighborhood, a vital and entrepreneurial black community that was demolished to build a massive housing project, is an example to which he returns. In their heyday, the working-class row houses of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Brooklyn were other examples, along with the countless small towns and cities of the railroad era. Moreover, even some poor neighborhoods that might fairly be called slums, such as the Lower East Side at its worst, offered fresh arrivals, working to gain an initial foothold, a place to start.
Husock invites readers to see that no prevalence of crowded, outdated buildings — let alone a concentration of poor people — should be presumed to mean that a place lacks economic value or social capital. Instead, he shows how, at its best, small-scale urbanism makes space for people of various circumstances. In its generic inclusiveness, it enriches residents through a bundle of qualities that allow them to build wealth and agency. Foremost among these — though now much diminished — was the traditional right to use one’s property resourcefully. This meant that homeowners could typically take on paying lodgers, build new units, or convert ground floors into stores or workshops — as they saw fit. Together, they engaged in what he calls a “virtuous conspiracy” to improve their community.
Having framed these truths about traditional urban settings, Husock runs head-on into the essential friction that has characterized the growth of American neighborhoods since the early 20th century: a basic tension between the scalable, self-reliant, and resourceful ethos that had shaped traditional urban-growth processes until that time, especially in poor neighborhoods, and the sudden rise of two major juggernauts in American public policy: land-use zoning and public-housing construction. The author’s tour of these topics is essential to understanding how U.S. cities — and their suburbs — have grown and taken their peculiarly American shape over the past century.
From the early 20th century, land-use regulations increasingly limited how owners could be resourceful, in unexpected and profound ways. In 1926, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to zoning. Since then, rules have reached far beyond the traditional scope of building codes, which cities had used since antiquity. Officials began to specify many more acts or actions that would be required, or prohibited, on private land. In addition to rules against obvious nuisances, boards began to require things such as single-family zones and precise yard dimensions. Choices that were once at the discretion of property owners — to add a new rental unit to an existing home, for example, or to build a code-compliant three-family house on a vacant lot — were ruled by zoning. An entire class of once-private decisions was subjected to politics.
At roughly the same time, a public-housing approach began to take shape, premised on a belief that individuals and markets were incapable of producing acceptable urban housing for poor people. Ignoring evidence to the contrary (such as the 1892 study that Husock cites, the role of changing migration rates, or the development of the West Bronx under the relatively liberal guidelines of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901), respectable progressive opinion concluded that private builders had failed. Therefore, in the terminology of a certain brand of textbook economics, the public sector would need to intervene and address this market failure by producing new, modern housing units.
Husock identifies public housing, which took shape from the New Deal into the postwar era, as another factor that distorted the traditional urban process. To wit, it was frequently built in tandem with slum-clearance projects, which used eminent domain to seize and demolish entire blocks of cities. In many cases, it took the forms of modernism, with high-rise projects on vast expanses of paved space. The result was wholesale destruction of neighborhoods and their intricate social ties, and displacement of residents to sterile units owned by public agencies. Husock contends that African Americans were disproportionately harmed by the economic impacts of public-housing policies, partly since tenants were disproportionately black, and would miss out on the wealth creation of homeownership, and partly because neighboring homeowners, whose property values suffered, were also likely to be black. While these arguments are compelling, the complexity of factors that reinforced a divergence of wealth statistics by race, even in the post–Civil Rights Era, makes it very difficult to measure the impacts of a particular cluster of bad policies on the overall wealth gap.
Finally, Husock looks at individuals who have found ways to build private, affordable housing even against the backdrop of public policies that discourage it. His subjects include William Levitt, who packed a board meeting with prospective buyers when seeking a variance for Levittown that would allow his famous cookie-cutter houses to be completed at an economical price and sold to returning World War II veterans with young families. He also introduces us to Millard Fuller, a Christian activist from Alabama who would recruit former president Jimmy Carter to bring his organization, Habitat for Humanity, to worldwide attention; and to the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, a black minister who has worked to develop countless private row houses in long-forsaken parts of New York City. With help from rising property values, these homes have blossomed into solid footholds for their owners. These stories remind us that cities, like wealth, are products of dynamic, cumulative, and ultimately human forces; their creation and stewardship are fundamentally arts, not sciences.
The Poor Side of Town is a valuable addition to the conversation about old urbanism. Husock recognizes the wisdom in customs, and he focuses more than many urbanists on the human-betterment value in what might be called traditional urban growth. Historically, towns and cities were shaped by simple rules that balanced the needs and preferences of residents. Today, those vital processes have frequently been frozen and distorted by grand bureaucratic frameworks, some more than a century old, often with enough discordant layers to render any coherent vision — or any path to a practical solution — impossible to discern. By illustrating the harmony between incremental, resourceful growth and the creation of socioeconomic capital, Husock shows that traditional urbanism is not merely an artifact of civilization, but an engine of it.